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Is free will real?
RE: Is free will real?
No one can prevail against the free will of fate...
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza
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RE: Is free will real?
.. nor opt to act in an entirely determined way.
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RE: Is free will real?
(January 2, 2015 at 10:21 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: No one can prevail against the free will of fate...

Ooh, you've moved from philosophy to poetry.
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RE: Is free will real?
(December 29, 2014 at 5:20 pm)rasetsu Wrote: ...I view something as an illusion if it appears as one thing, but in reality is something else.
You will get no argument with that statement. I didn't see in your post any support for the idea that what people experience as free will is indeed an illusion. What makes you believe that the experience of making a free choice is a trick, i.e. 'something else' and not what it appears to be?
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RE: Is free will real?
If you watch a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat, it looks real, but, based on experience that magic does not exist, you know it to be an illusion. If a magician really magically pulled a rabbit from the hat, you would have no way of knowing that it was not an illusion. What is your basis for 'knowing' free will is not an illusion?
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RE: Is free will real?
(January 3, 2015 at 7:30 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: What makes you believe that the experience of making a free choice is a trick, i.e. 'something else' and not what it appears to be?
What does it appear to be? Does color appear to be wavelengths of light striking the retina, causing a factory of moleculer structures into action that transmit information to the brain that then fixes an image of an object with the property of color? Why should a scientifically literate interpretation of human thought and behavior be any less revelatory with regards to the actual world and our experience of it?
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza
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RE: Is free will real?
(December 15, 2014 at 4:15 am)The_greatest_river Wrote: What do you think?

You have *true free will* when you have made a choice god didn't know you were going to make.

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RE: Is free will real?
(January 3, 2015 at 10:50 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote:
(January 3, 2015 at 7:30 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: What makes you believe that the experience of making a free choice is a trick, i.e. 'something else' and not what it appears to be?
What does it appear to be? Does color appear to be wavelengths of light striking the retina, causing a factory of moleculer structures into action that transmit information to the brain that then fixes an image of an object with the property of color? Why should a scientifically literate interpretation of human thought and behavior be any less revelatory with regards to the actual world and our experience of it?
People experience free will when they can conceive and consciously deliberate over potential courses of action and select among those choices apart from internal or external compulsion. One must presuppose physical causal closure to conclude that all choices are compelled.

Your color example assumes that the subjective of experience of color is identical to and reducible to some set of physical operations. Since one does not share all the qualities of the other (Law of Identity) the example fails.
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RE: Is free will real?
No presupposition is required. We've observed hard determinism. Special pleading is required to remove -ourselves- from what we've observed everywhere else we've looked (and, of course....even in ourselves).

(Pickup actually described the set of physical operations the subjective experience of color reduces too.....in case you missed that, this description isn't an assumption, but a series of observations. What quality does one have that the other does not?)
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RE: Is free will real?
Hard determinism is one interpretation grounded in ontological naturalism. It is not, as you suggest, the raw data.

Mechanical processes are not about anything; they lack content. The experiences of knowing subjects are directed toward that which is experienced.
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